52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 35
Prompt – Unforgettable
On November 22, 1963 I was in grade 3
and about 8 years old. I was at home sick from school that day. The
television was on and I can remember the announcement that President
J.F. Kennedy had been shot. It had interrupted whatever show I had been
watching while laying on the couch. I didn't fully understand who he
was. I remember thinking that he was someone important because
newsmen were wiping tears away in front of the camera when they
announced he had died. The television seemed in chaos. Fast forward
a week or so and I watched the newscast show on highlights of JFK's
funeral. He had small children that attended the funeral. All I
could think about was what it would be like if I lost my father and
had to attend his funeral. The reality of my mortality was taking shape
and I couldn't stop thinking about death and dying for some time.
In December of 1967, the first human to
human heart transplant had occurred in South Africa. The night time
news was shocked by this medical miracle. I guess some thought Dr. C
Barnard was playing God by delaying an inevitable death. I was 13
and thought that this was the most miraculous thing I would ever see. It was mind boggling. It sparked my imagination and curiosity of what else could be done. This was only the beginning of medical advancements in my lifetime. For heaven's sake when I took nursing there was just x-ray machines
and ultra sound machines had just come into being the next big thing.
July 20, 1969 American Astronauts
landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the
moon. I was 15 years old and unlike many, I did not witness it live
on the television but listened to it on a car radio. I belonged to
The Charlie Brown All-Stars midget girls fastball team and we were
coming back from a ball tournament. Our coach had half the team in
his station wagon. I remember sitting in the back with several other
team members. Our coach shushed us and turned up his radio as we
listened to the radio announcer countdown to the touchdown. We all
cheered loud. We knew it was going to be an unforgettable historic
moment in our life that we would tell our children and grandchildren.
I cut out all of the newspaper articles and pasted them into a
scrapbook. I wanted to preserve the moments of this time. It was the
beginning of my need to preserve my mind boggling events for future generations.
September 11, 2001. or 9/11. It was
suppose to be just another ordinary day. At first it seemed that
way. Our radio station said that a plane had hit one of the twin
towers in New York. I turned on TV and flipped the channel to CNN. Just in time to see live the second plane crash into the second
tower. It is an image that I and millions of others will never forget. I worked at a doctor's office and had to go to
work. As patients came in they kept us posted on the latest. My
stomach sank at the news of the collapsed towers. The whole thing
was too much to absorb. It was hard to make sense of it and deaths of
all those innocent people. How could one group of people do this to
another? The world would never be the same but we just didn't know
it then. It was so traumatic that families connected to each other
by phone in record numbers. I felt that the world just became a
little less safe and I did not like that feeling of loss of
innocence.
I believe when we look back on the year
2020 we will see how Coronavirus changed our world. The global
pandemic brought more than the deaths by the novel virus. It changed
how we lived. Schools closed and work places shut down, We stayed
home in our isolated groups. We needed to figure out our lives in a
new way. The economic impact was immediate and everyone felt it. Since it still is an ongoing concern there will be more to talk about
it for years to come.
These are just a few of the
unforgettable world events in my life time that impacted me in a
profound way. We all have these moments in time where we can say what
we were doing at that time it happened. Every generation has them.
Wendy
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